The Grotesque (11 page)

It was night. I saw a man on a bicycle, with a load on his shoulder, pedaling toward me down the Ceck’s Bottom road. It was a bulky load, all tied up in an old sack, and it flopped about as the bicycle glided through the shadows of oak boughs and foliage. He sat up very erect in the saddle, this dark rider, and as he drew close I recognized something familiar in the stiffness of his figure. It was not until he passed through a pool of blotchy moonlight, however, that I was able to make out his features. It was Fledge, of course; and as he turned off down the cart track I realized with a lurch of shock that what he carried in the sack on his shoulder could only be the body of Sidney Giblet:
he was taking it out to the marsh.

What did this mean? What was I trying to tell myself? Why would he be carting Sidney’s body out to the marsh? Then slowly, and with a dawning sensation of horror, I realized that I’d got the whole thing the wrong way round, completely arse-backwards. It was
Fledge
who was being blackmailed by
Sidney,
I realized, not vice versa, and for this he had murdered the boy. I sat up rigid in my chair, the beer glass suspended halfway to my lips. But why, I thought? What was at stake, that he would murder for it? What on earth would justify murder? And it was then, for the first time, that I glimpsed the true outline of the fiend’s design: he had murdered Sidney to prevent the boy from disturbing his scheme to usurp
me
—the bastard was after my house!

I drained off my beer and returned in my mind to the marsh; and now I saw him standing on the edge of a pit he had dug, at the bottom of which lay a blackly gleaming pool of water. I saw him guide the bicycle over the edge, and I saw it tip, and fall, and splash to rest in the black water at the bottom. He stood there at the edge of the pit, framed against the moon, and it was as though
I
were at the bottom, gazing up at him. But why didn’t he toss the sack in too? Why hadn’t the sack come up with the bicycle? This was strange. I frowned. I lit a cigar. I sank back into the chair, and allowed my mind to drift once more. And it occurred to me then that perhaps he had been disturbed in his work, that he had heard someone coming through the trees, and been forced to creep off into the darkness—to come back later and fill in the pit. But if he’d been surprised in this way (so ran my reasoning), it was unlikely he’d have been able to haul off the bulk of a sacked corpse with him, it was far too cumbersome; and if this was so, if he’d crept off without it—and for some weird reason I felt certain that this indeed was what had happened—then whoever it was had disturbed him would have come upon the ghastly thing, and then, improbable though it may seem, would have
removed it
from the vicinity of the bicycle pit. Again I sat up in my chair, puffing energetically on my cigar. Was this feasible? It did at least explain why the bicycle had come up but not the sack. But if it furnished an answer to that question, it raised the even more perplexing one of
why the other man had failed to report what he’d found.

And it was at
that
point I realized I could think of only four men who would be out on the Ceck Marsh at that time of night; and all four were at that very moment sitting with me in George Lecky’s kitchen, barking with laughter as they swallowed brown ale.

I
did not get any further with my speculations that night. Frankly, I backed off; these were men I’d known for many years, all my life in the case of Crowthorne, Cudlip, and Bracknell, and it was impossible to imagine any of them trying to dispose of a corpse in some improper manner. I decided to suspend my hypothesis for the time being, and await new facts. This is the inductive method; it had guided my thinking for over thirty years.

What I dreaded now, having made a positive identification of the bicycle, was breaking the news to Cleo. At first she took it like a Coal, square on the chin. “I knew it,” she muttered, clenching her fists and taking a number of deep breaths. It was Boxing Day, we were in my study, and Harriet, whom I’d already told, was sitting anxiously on the edge of an armchair, ready with the solace of the maternal bosom. But the maternal bosom, it seemed, was not needed. Pressing her lips together and frowning darkly, the girl turned toward the fire and, plunging her hands into the pockets of her skirt, gazed for a few moments into the flames. “Well,” she said, looking up at last, brisk and brave, “it rather looks as if Sidney came to grief on the marsh after all. You see, I’ve been expecting this; I
knew.
”

Harriet, who had half risen from her chair, anticipating a flood of tears—and ready to tell Cleo that the bicycle being found proved nothing at all—sank back, and a rather puzzled concern clouded her features. “Darling,” she said, “what do you mean, you
knew?”

A most peculiar thing happened then. There was a sudden flare of energy in Cleo, but it was a strange, wild energy. She
laughed,
you see, in a joyless, manic sort of way, and cried out, “What I say, Mummy! I
knew!
He came and told me!”

“Darling, do sit down, please. Who told you?”

“He did! Sidney did!” And then she burst into tears and flung herself into an armchair, where she buried her face in her hands and sobbed convulsively. Harriet was beside her instantly. “But darling, darling—”

With an awful wail Cleo brushed her mother aside and fled from the room. Harriet gazed at me, dumb with shock, and then, went after the girl. “No, Harriet,” I said sharply, “let her go.” Harriet paused, her hand on the doorknob; she turned toward me. “Let her go,” I said quietly, and crossing the room, I led her back to her armchair by the fire, where she sat in a state of dazed dismay while I made her a drink.

I
sit here in my cave, in my grotto, and think of Cleo, Cleo with her buckteeth and lively eyes, her elfin presence, her quick, light ways... Did I mention that the only good that has come of this term I’ve spent among the ontologically dead has been Cleo’s sympathy? That sympathy has, alas, become rarer and more fleeting; the scene I have just described, in which she told us that she knew what had happened to Sidney, that he had told her, was the first indication to Harriet and myself that something was seriously amiss with our daughter; it was, in fact, the first manifestation of a mental illness that has, in recent months, progressively enshrouded her mind. She does have moments of lucidity—inspired lucidity—and it was during one of these that she saw what all the rest of them are blind to, that I, Hugo, am still thinking and feeling within the frame of this inert and failing flesh.

You see, after my cerebral accident Crook entered a period of tranquillity. The storm of my personality had ceased to rage, and a smooth calm settled on the surface of life, a deceptive calm, I believe, that concealed within it the workings of dark and restless forces—but a calm, nonetheless. I was much alone, in those early days after leaving the hospital, with the grotesques of my imagination; and when I believed myself unobserved, I would at times permit myself to weep, as I contemplated my own ruin and the ruin of my house. The day I sat facing the wall and, hearing the sounds of a chess game behind me, imagined a scene of venereal depravity —that day I permitted the tears to fall, and when Cleo entered the drawing room and with a cry of indignation turned my wheelchair to the light, she saw the tears and, suddenly quiet, sank to her knees beside me, and bringing her face close to mine, gazed into my eyes—and
saw me.
“Daddy,” she breathed, her face still but a few inches from mine, so that I gazed back at eyes the precise same shade of gray as my own, “Daddy,” she whispered, “you’re in there, I know you are.” And from that moment forward I was no longer alone. Fledge knew, of course, but he used the knowledge to torment me. Cleo loved me.

But as I say, Cleo is rarely with us anymore. Like me she has been trapped in a false world of shadows and phantoms; for her, as for me, the borders and boundaries of the real and the fantastic have become blurred, unreliable, faulty. In her, as in me, order is crumbling. But I at least can see it crumbling. Cleo cannot do even that, or rather, she does it increasingly rarely. In fact, in these last days her recognition of my own sentient existence has grown so sporadic that she no longer provides me any real support. It is Fledge, ironically, who maintains me—he maintains me with his hatred. I think that were he to cease to hate me, were he to deprive me of this last fragile link, this last
relation
with the world, then I should be swallowed up, sink into darkness for good. Doubtless there would be a final gasp, a last solipsistic flurry of ideation, but then I would fall silent, truly become the vegetable the world takes me for. This, as I say, is the irony of my existence, that I have come to require the hatred of a bad servant simply to
be.
Ontologically I am not dead, but I am clinging to the ledge with my fingernails!

But Cleo. It was of Cleo, not myself, that I intended to speak, for as I say, with her mysterious declaration that Sidney had told her what had happened to him, Harriet and I first began to understand how deeply the loss of the boy had touched her. “Let her go, Harriet,” I had said in the study that night; I knew that, like me, Cleo would prefer to recover from an access of intense emotion privately and alone, that she would seek us out as and when she wished to speak about it, and not before. For the next two days, then, a pall of sadness lay upon the house, as the fact of Cleo’s grief permeated the atmosphere. Everybody felt it, everybody understood it. The girl came down to meals but was silent and listless. Her face, normally so lively, so mobile, rapidly and dramatically reflected her inner state—dark shadows appeared around her eyes, her cheeks seemed to hollow out, to become gaunt and harrowed with pain. We all felt for her, and waited for her to begin to come to terms with her emotions. That process was disturbed, however, by two events; and the first of these was the pipes of Crook bursting.

❖

It was my grandfather, a farsighted and energetic Victorian called Sir Digby Coal, who introduced indoor plumbing to Crook. The household is today still served by the lavatories he installed, which, in their day, were much admired: the seats and covers were of pale oak, all the brass fittings shone like gold, and the bowls were sculpted from the finest white china. The tank is in the attic, and Sir Digby did not rest until the flushing mechanism functioned to that standard of efficiency that his generation brought to bear on everything it undertook. For Sir Digby Coal, even the humble lavatory served to express the idea of Progress.

But last winter Crook experienced a cold snap that was suddenly, in the days after Christmas, punctuated by a thaw, and Sir Digby’s obsolescent and cantankerous pipes promptly burst. A crisis ensued: the kitchen was flooded, and the central heating, senile and inefficient though it was, had to be shut down. There was no running water. In the very somber atmosphere that had descended upon us, it was as though the house were performing its own tearful requiem for Sidney Giblet, a sort of gesture of hydraulic condolence. So it was that on New Year’s Eve we all sat down to a breakfast of deviled kidneys amid the noise and clatter of the Ceck plumber and his two sons; and where before had reigned the hushed silence appropriate to the situation, there was now the sloshing of mops, the banging of spanners, and the cheery, whistling bustle of men at work. And as we sat in this din, the telephone suddenly raised its shrill mechanic voice. Some moments later Fledge materialized at my elbow.

“Telephone, Sir Hugo.”

Down the table eyes were lifted in mild curiosity, except Victor’s; he was deep in his Freud.

“Who is it, Fledge?”

Hilary began to smear marmalade on a piece of toast. Harriet was stirring her tea. I folded the
Times.

“It’s Mrs. Giblet.”

“Oh
no!”
This from Cleo, who rose from the table and left the room.

❖

I returned to the dining room five minutes later. An expectant hush greeted my reentry. “Well?” said Harriet. I sat down. I told Fledge to give me more tea. I then reported that Mrs. Giblet had been informed by Inspector Limp about the bicycle being dug up in the marsh. That, I said, was not all. Considering herself qualified to furnish some real assistance to the police (of whose intelligence she was apparently no great admirer), she had traveled to Ceck, and was even now ensconced in the Hodge and Purlet.

A gasp from Harriet. “Oh good heavens,” she said, gazing at me with genuine distress. “Hugo, must we have her here? We must.”

“I explained to Mrs. Giblet about our pipes,” I replied. “I told her she would be more comfortable where she was.”

“Well that’s a relief, at any rate,” murmured Harriet.

“I did, however, feel obliged to ask her to dine with us tonight.”

“Yes, of course,” said Harriet. “Oh dear, poor woman. She’s probably just as upset as Cleo. More so!” She sighed. She had already extended her full sympathy, as a woman and as a mother, to that ghastly old battle-ax, that dragon, who had settled now in our midst and would undoubtedly belch flame and ill-smelling smoke into all our lives. I made for the barn, reflecting, not for the first time, that if I’d had the slightest inkling of the trouble Sidney Giblet was going to cause, I’d never have let him within a mile of Crook in the first place.

❖

The last night of the old year; and seven of us sat down to dinner. Next to me and to my left was Mrs. Giblet. She had arrived at Crook in a vast and shapeless fur coat with padded shoulders, and a black hat whose brim was pinned up on one side and embellished with sprigs of lace and crimson cherries. In one arm she clutched her lapdog; with the other she gripped the handle of her rubber-tipped walking stick, the one with the skull embedded in the crook. She wore gloves of black satin and a large white pearl in each pendent and withered earlobe. Fledge attempted to take her coat from her, but she insisted on keeping it on for the time being, until she was “adjusted.” Wily old bird, she realized immediately of course that in a house like this the central heating was probably tepid at the best of times. With burst pipes we had only fires to warm us, and Crook is a house of drafts.